Animals make for terrible technology. The technological use of animals—making food, drugs, clothing, and cosmetics out of animal material—will cease. A cow takes over one year to grow, "wastes" over ninety percent of what it's fed, and cannot be innovated much further. After Meat explains the fundamental limits of animal technology in terms of physics and biology. Replacement technology such as microbial fermentation will surpass those limits. Eventually, we'll have food that is better in every way—in terms of taste, cost, nutrition, resource consumption, and ethics—because we won't use animals to produce it.

Along the way, After Meat leads us through a veritable forest of adjacent topics. We wade into evolution and reductivism, broach consciousness and the Multiverse, dive into economics and policy, bounce from weather prediction to the problem of hunger to the morality of eating plants. In sum, we ineluctably conclude that our future has little room for animal technology, and that future will be better for it.